


Lovely Dust

by treesfall



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/M, Implied Relationships, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 09:31:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/treesfall/pseuds/treesfall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nico doesn’t budge when the shadows by the closed, locked door ripple and pull away in the vibrating form of his sister.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lovely Dust

**Author's Note:**

> Implied incest, set after the original series so no spoilers beyond book four, really. This includes lyrics from ["All I See" by Lydia](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb0HHq5KxOo). Originally written for [pjo_xchange](http://pjo-xchange.livejournal.com/profile).

On nights when the sky looks darkest, the blackest of blacks, the clock creaks to a halt at midnight, the turning of the tides. Nico, in a sweat-slick slumber, doesn’t budge when the shadows by the closed, locked door ripple and pull away in the vibrating form of his sister.

Bianca grimaces, feeling her unnatural summoning to the material world. Her black silhouette grows out of the darkness, energized by Nico’s mumbled chanting. The darkness settles like dust in the aftermath, graying out and then lightening until she’s a white glow in the room. Her skin burns white hot, an itch just beneath her skin—a strange corporeal feeling to which she has long since grown unaccustomed. Looking down at her hand, Bianca feels like she’s too bright, casting off light in this impossibly black room.

The Hades cabin is empty, creepy, desolate save for Nico, a soul doomed for depravation before he was born. He summons the dead in his sleep without realizing that his deepest needs are inherently wrong by nature.

He chants in ancient Greek as Bianca suffers; his voice is laden with conviction, drawing her too strongly into his world. When his voice falters in his sleep, she feels life being sucked out of her dead shimmer, her glow dulling to a soft gray. There’s an essence to her, in this room, that makes her feel _alive_ again. There’s a certain wholeness and vigor that pervades her being, as though she weren’t simply made of mist. As though she could touch her brother, hug him, speak to him, as though he could see her even if he weren’t the son of her father.

 _Desperate_ , she thinks as her eyes rest on Nico. He’s taller yet again, and there’s am frustrating feeling of pin-pricks at the back of her eyes. Her throat closes up, and it hurts even more because she shouldn’t be able to feel such physical responses; she’s _dead_ after all, and even ghost summoning ought not be so potent.

Every time he summons her, she looks at how much her brother has grown—how his cheeks are no longer round with young age but are slanted and sunken, how his hair is too long and falls into his eyes as he sleeps, casting darkness over him even more. His limbs threaten to stretch off the end of the bed, and Bianca feels sadness ping in her chest, her rib cage shudders with the ambivalent feeling of _Nico_ again.

There’s a thickness in the air, the comfort and knowledge that her brother is around. Even as a ghost, she can feel his presence pressing in around her uncomfortably, too real and too persistent.

She shouldn’t be here, she doesn’t _want_ to be here. It simply hurts too much.

Bianca wishes for silence so that she may process this, may come to terms with the fact her brother is holding on too tightly, too deeply. That he is unconsciously beckoning her in his sleep, calling out so forcefully that she feels more human than ghost.

More alive than mist, and all because of Nico.

She watches his lips, moving restlessly and unceasingly with the delicate Greek spell. His words unconsciously compel her toward the bed, her feet shift over the floor without feeling, ghosting through the air of _his_ volition.

Nico’s voice raises in the vacant distance between them, and Bianca notices that his voice is deeper than it used to be, that it strikes a chord within her more painfully than ever before. He’s older, more a man than a boy.

She can’t protect him, but not for lack of want. She cannot save him from himself; he’s old enough now to know better. They always should’ve known better, but weren’t they damned from the start? It certainly feels that way, and so as Bianca falls onto the bed, loose-limbed and light, she does not feel sorry. She only feels fate.

She’s meant to be here, even if she would rather not. It’s too painful, always too painful.

 _It’s been years_ , she reminds herself, brushing off the feeling of how Nico’s skin feels warm—she shouldn’t feel him. She should evaporate, the mist of her body scattering, shying away from his unconscious touch.

He’s seventeen, and she’s smaller than him now. Bianca struggles to reconcile this with the fact that she’s his older sister, frozen in a younger body. It’s her duty to protect him; he’s a broken boy, and nobody will stick by his side long enough. Nico’s too skinny, too lost, too sad a boy to be loved like she needs him to be.

And so, he’s going to keep loving her, keep turning to her even when she can’t be there for him. She was all he ever had.

Nico never realized that he was all _she_ had either. He doesn’t realize that he’s summoning her in his sleep, let alone that he’s ripping her to pieces in so doing. She’s strong enough to die for her brother, strong enough to protect him from the monsters.

But Bianca can’t save him from himself, she is powerless to stop him now, when she most dreadfully desires to. Laboriously, she inhales, feeling the rush of stagnant air into her echoes of lung, those remnants of herself non-existent in this half-life.

Carefully, so as not to wake Nico, Bianca cautiously moves her hand toward his mouth, afraid of what will happen. She should vanish, dissipating into the very air around him. And she does, but not before Nico shivers, shudders away from the cold air, falling silent. His chanting stops, and Bianca feels a painful pang shoot through her.

She’s already on her way out now, her clock is ticking once again.

It hurts to see Nico once more, to see how much he misses her, how deep his wounds run. But it hurts more to leave him, and Bianca strives to get as close to him as she can before she jolts back to the underworld.

Sooner or later, she’ll be back here, but when that is, she has no idea. Bianca only knows that it always happens again, she’s always walking the same endless cycle of heartache and unachievable need. Unsatisfying and destructive.

Even though Nico is a bruised boy of darkness, he feels warm. It’s a sickly warm, a tormented heat; there is no comforting warmth to Nico to ease her mind.

There are inches between them, as close as she can ever be to his olive skin, painted over with a weak pallor. “We will always be safe here in this bed,” she whispers, assuring him.

Her voice echoes out as a rush of air, no words, and she knows that she’s closer to vanishing that she’d thought. Without Nico awake to keep her here, there is nothing tying her to this world aside from her own frantic wants. And fate listens to nobody.

Nico turns toward her in his sleep as if instinctually, mumbling in Greek once more, and an exhausted, fatigued look of shock crosses Bianca’s face. She wants nothing more than to stay with him; she wants nothing more than to leave.

All he ever wanted was his sister back from the dead. All she ever wanted was her brother.

They were destined to want the only things they could never have.

Nico startles Bianca from the twinge in her soul, whispering a, “All I see scares me,” in his sleep. He struggles toward her, fighting the sheets, fighting the divide between them—they are but two ghosts. Neither of them may exist in the other’s world.

She remembers telling him once that he couldn’t have her back, that if he loved her, he wouldn’t try.

She remembers. She left him. And she’ll leave him again. She cannot be here when he wakes.

He’ll never be loved by any one as she loves him, and she’s afraid of that. She’s afraid of how much she loves Nico, how she would do anything to be with him again, even if she’d fit in his arms in a way that he previously fit into hers.

She cannot be here when he wakes, and so she isn’t, fleeing to the underworld with dust particles for tears in her eyes and the sight of his haunted teenage face burned into her soul. She doesn’t have long now, she feels the tug of the demons on her soul, a thick rope pulling her away.

Bianca futilely attempts to resist the yearning in her soul to hug Nico, to hold him and tell him that everything will be okay, that he’ll always have her. Guilt rises up within her; she told him she’d always be there for him, and she lied unintentionally.

Death was nothing compared to this pain; the weight of Talos crushing her to dust feels like only a gust of wind compared to the weight of Nico’s suffering on her heart; it crushes her from all sides, irreparable damage.

Unconsciously, she leans forward, ghosting her lips over his, feeling the momentary mumble of Greek from him—voice rough, shattered, torn with desolation.

Bianca shouldn’t have felt him, his chapped lips and his warm breath and the outline of his summons underneath her lips. She’ll pay for that later.

When she opens her eyes, he’s gone. The wearisome gray of the underworld ices over her heart in a way that Nico’s suffering couldn’t; his presence causes her pain, but she seeks it more than this afterlife.

-

In the morning, Nico feels sore, scared in a way he usually is not by nightmares. He cannot remember the unnerving dream that he feels he had. The fear he feels in echoes seems too much like a fear of himself, of home. It’s unsettling, and Nico is afraid of the world around him, afraid of himself.

He’s scared of the only thing he has for reasons he cannot identify.

As he brushes his hair, ready to leave his cabin, his eyes look to the mirror above his dresser. He doesn’t seem himself, but rather a black and white image of Bianca smiling sadly at him burns in his eyes. She fades away, slipping behind his own reflection until she’s simply a shadow of him.

He remembers, and he wants nothing more than to apologize. To summon her back and beg for her forgiveness, tell her he won’t do it again.

Nico knows that he cannot do that though. He can’t touch her, he can’t call her back because he’s too old to get away with that now. He _knows_ better, knows just how it makes her feel, but he can’t stop himself when he’s asleep; his unconscious mind reaches out blindly for her.

Most of all, Nico could never tell Bianca that it won’t happen again. Because he knows it will.

Slowly, the remorse settles into sadness. Nico feels like the only love he had in life was wasted. He wonders when the world became so cruel as to take the only person he had to call his own.

He loved a wild thing that death could touch, that _he_ could touch. Whether it’s foolish or not, Nico still can’t help but blame himself for her death in some way, and he was so stupid as to love something that he could take from himself.

He hates himself for what he does to her; he hates that he can’t help himself.

His love amounts to dust, but as Nico breathes in the stale air of Hades cabin, he feels his throat catch, he feels _her_.

He loves Bianca, and so he tortures her. She loves Nico, and so she lets him.


End file.
